A very Melbourne weekend

For an English country boy moving to a cosmopolitan city on the other side of the world has been an eye opener. Was London ever like this, or did I just not make the most of it? For example my weekend has dragged me north and south to tiny bars, freezing festivals, 1920’s big bands and wine filled former markets.

Melbourne is very much like London in that those born south of the river, rarely venture north of it and vice verse. If they do they’ll complain about it. It takes the foreigner or the migrant to ignore the riparian boundary and make the most of the whole of the city.

Happy to venture north of the river from my inner south suburb, I had discovered the Leaps and Bounds Music Festival, a small festival of local acts performing in venues around the northern suburbs. Now you either like the music of David Bowie played on ukulele or you don’t! I happen to love a 3 piece known as The Thin White Ukes who played at the fantastically named Some Velvet Morning (if you don’t know the song, look it up on You Tube) in a suburb called Clifton Hill on Thursday evening.

The bar itself is probably the smallest I’ve visited in Melbourne and all the better for it. In my experience Aussie pubs and bars tend towards the huge and impersonal, vast caverns with no atmosphere. Some Velvet Morning is the opposite with friendly, cheerful bar staff, a simple greek based menu, short well chosen wine list and an interesting selection of beer. It is tiny, but it has a shuffle board table upstairs (which you don’t see every day), plus a band room which accommodates all of 30 people, making it an intimate, cosy space, especially on a cold winter’s evening.

The band were both great fun and highly talented, making me blush when I think about my own attempts at the ukulele, giving a new take on both Bowie classics and a few lesser known numbers. If you get the chance go and see them. I was lucky enough to talk to them afterwards and hope I was able to help with some contacts for gigs in the UK.

The following night I was back south of the river at the Map 57 Festival in St. Kilda. For those who don’t know the city St. Kilda is Melbourne’s seaside playground, especially if you’re a non-native; Melburnuians wouldn’t be seen dead there, unless of course there’s a festival on.

Map 57 refers to the page in Melways where St. Kilda falls, it also falls in greater clarity on page 2N, but I guess Map 57 sounds like a better name than the Map 2N Festival. Oh, you don’t know what Melways is, well its the ludicrously large map book that every Melbourne car has tucked into a seat pocket and these days is never referred to, a local A-Z guidebook with way too many pages.

The festival occupies a small corner of parkland adjacent to the splendid Palais Theatre,  where incidentally the very latest chart topping pop combos Boney M and Adam Ant are due to play soon. The small festival site boasts an ice rink and a big wheel alongside, a bar in a tram carriage, street food stalls, much needed fire pits on a freezing evening and two performance spaces including The Box, a welcomingly warm temporary theatre.

Gin is having a moment, no Melbourne bar would dream of stocking less than 10 varieties, in fact the town has not one but two festivals devoted to the spirit. Indeed gin is having a moment everywhere, on my recent visit back to the UK even rural Norfolk pubs had a gin of the week, and if you’ve been to Norfolk you’ll know how remarkable that is! Somehow my home town has its own gin brand too courtesy of the local boat yard. Therefore it’s no great surprise that it has become a suitable subject for cabaret.

Two ladies in cocktail dresses, a bearded gent at the upright piano, harmonies and giggles as we are taken through history by Mothers Ruin A Cabaret About Gin, puns abound as do stories from Gin Lane to Prohibition accompanied by well known and original songs sung beautifully. Gin is swilled while the best is saved to last with a song entitled I’ve Drunk Every Gin. The cabaret is due in the UK very soon including stops in London and the Edinburgh Festival, check it out if you can.

Luckily the gin hadn’t got the better of me as I headed the following day to North Melbourne and the old Meat Market for Barossa Be Consumed, 44 wineries, offering a massive 220 wines to taste and no matter how small the sample and how much you spit that is potentially mind numbing.

This was an incredibly popular event, hardly surprising given that the Barossa is one of Australia’s great wine regions, boasting well known names such as Yalumba, Jacobs Creek, Peter Lehman, St. Hallett and Henshke. It’s always great to meet the people who actually make the wine and hear their stories, they’re always passionate and this was one of those tastings where the winemakers were in abundance, especially amongst the smaller producers such as Sons of Eden, Bethany and Teusner. Avoiding the big names then, my increasingly shaky notes indicate I still managed to sample 66 different wines. Ouch.

So what was good, well most of it, despite the preponderance of Australia’s favourite wine, Shiraz, which always seems to be drunk when its far too young in this country, so the flavours never get to develop. However there were some real winners for me, here’s five of them:

• Spinifex Eden Vally Reisling 2016 – subtle and complex
• Bethany Chardonnay 2015 – very little oak, peach & melon, so subtle its almost un-Australian
• Tim Smith Wines Reserve Mataro 2015 – spicy palate with dark berry flavours
• Saltram Mamre Brook Cabernet Sauvignon 2012 – rich and beautifully fruity
• Kaesler The Bogan Shiraz 2014 – anyone who’s prepared to call their wine Bogan is alright in my book, but it also has lots of length, the right amount of spice and ripe plum, above all it has flavour, give it 10 years and it’ll be ready to really enjoy.

Recovered from all that wine there was just time on Sunday for a quick visit to Prahran Market before returning to one of my favourite Melbourne discoveries where one of its quirkiest bands was playing. The Spotted Mallard in Brunswick has enjoyed a Sunday afternoon residency all month from Andrew Nolte and His Orchestra. Mr. Nolte is one of Melbourne’s great eccentrics, a man who has based his musical career on recreating the big band sounds of the 1920’s complete with vintage microphone, brylcreemed hair and pencil moustache.

Inspired by the orchestra’s syncopated sounds the Mallard’s dance floor fills quickly with astonishingly accomplished dancers while small children shake and sway in the background as those of us with two left feet tap both of them, there is a truly joyous relaxed, friendly vibe.  You may not know the tunes but the sound of a good big band always makes you smile. And this must be the only big band in the last 6 decades to launch their new recording as a 78rpm vinyl record!

The Spotted Mallard is basically one large upstairs ballroom making it ideal for live music, it has a great beer list including the very good Stockade Brew Rare Ink Stout, which in this land of fizz and chills is neither too gassy or too cold for a winters day.  Some days it has mulled wine too, which is how my wife and I stumbled upon it in the first place.

It may be winter in Melbourne where it can be cold, grey and wet, where houses have no heating or insulation, where roads flood with just the smallest drop of rain and where roadworks are absolutely everywhere but it is still a great place to discover with some wonderful events for a very Melbourne weekend. In the words of Mr. Nolte “May it please you”.

 

 

A fishy business

On moving to Australia it was a requirement to gaining a visa to take out private health cover. As a result we ended up paying a small fortune to our chosen provider for cover it seems we didn’t and don’t necessarily need. For example my wife, discovered after a while that we were automatically covered for maternity but not for an ambulance. I can tell you maternity cover is surplus to requirements.

Why would we need to be covered for an ambulance you ask, especially if you are British? It seems that in some states, of which Victoria is one, you will be charged for an ambulance call-out, emergency or not. The current fee is $1,146, approx £700. This is one of the many features that Australian health care shares with the USA, the fact that nothing comes for free.

Or at least thats how it seems on the surface. Yet there is also the government run scheme called Medicare, which entitles permanent residents and some visitors such as me to subsidised treatment from various practitioners – including midwives, though as mentioned previously we really don’t need that cover – and also it seems free hospital treatment in public hospitals.

And that is what this blog is actually about. Not how shocking it is for a Pom to pay for anything other than a prescription but just how good the public system has been to me, without a cent changing hands (despite my best efforts). As friends on Facebook will know I was attacked by a fish while on holiday over Christmas. Not a shark, which really would have needed that ambulance cover, but a Stingray. As many people have reminded me one of those killed Aussie croc wrangling hero and TV superstar Steve Irwin. Fortunately the one I accidentally stood on didn’t strike me in the heart but the ankle.

As I learned later a Stingray barb is poisonous, while it seems wounds received in seawater are prone to infection. Australians know this stuff, not so Poms. Hence after the pain died down and the wound stopped bleeding I didn’t think much more of it, despite my wife’s suggestion I visit the local ER. She had a point. A week or so later while at a friends cabin in the northern NSW rain forest the ankle in question started to balloon and some really nasty looking stuff began oozing out. The previous week had been spent camping in various beautiful but dusty locations, swimming in creeks and generally getting grubby, like you do when camping. This may have been a mistake.

Now, I try and stay out of hospital as much as I can but for someone brought up with the emergency waiting rooms of the NHS, full of bleeding, drunk, wailing people the Kyogle Memorial Hospital was an unbelievable experience.

There was no one there, in their brand new hospital. It was a ghost hospital, quite surreal in its emptiness. Literally the only people I saw were medical or admin staff. There were doctors, nurses, orderlies, a phlebotomist and a receptionist but no patients, not in Emergency or any where else as far as I could ascertain. No wonder they looked so pleased when I walked in, they were looking for someone new to talk to!

Seen within 5 minutes of registering by unfailingly friendly and helpful staff I was thoroughly assessed, given a tetanus shot a script for antibiotics the size of horse pills and sent on my way 35 minutes later. No money changed hands. Medical cover was not needed apart from reclaiming 50% of the cost of the prescription. If you read the story in the Henley Herald you will realise by now that some journalistic license was used in the retelling of this part of the tale.

Horse pills all popped life returned to normal back in Melbourne…that is until one fateful day a month after the original fish strike. Following a morning yelling at schoolboy rowers in Albert Park the ooze had returned, the ankle was ballooning, this time accompanied by a hard lump on my achilles tendon. There had been some weird squeaking in my ankle earlier in the week but I’d chosen to ignore it. This may have been another mistake.

Limping my way to the GP I reflected that perhaps I should have gone to the doctor when it first happened, perhaps my wife really did have a point. However here I was with a now frowning GP who didn’t like the look of it, not one bit. I’d share a photo of the swollen, puss filled leg but really don’t want to put you off your dinner, needless to say it didn’t look good.

My GP, a young man barely old enough to shave gave me the specified 10 minute consultation as they always do here, accompanied by some prodding and poking and extended bouts of frowning. Yes he was excited to have a patient who’d been struck by a Stingray which isn’t something that happens much in Port Phillip Bay, but he really didn’t want pus all over his nice surgery.

Back under the NHS I would have been given more antibiotics and a referral for a specialist, but my Aussie GP made some phone calls and packed me off to the emergency room at the local hospital. In this case, at the surgery, money did change hands but then half of it was refunded again under Medicare. Non-billing doctors are available under a system called bulk-billing, there’s just not many where we live.

The Alfred is I’m told Victoria’s premier trauma centre, so I was expecting a long wait. But again the waiting room was virtually empty. 15 minutes after arriving I was sitting on a bed waiting for a doctor. 30 minutes later the emergency doctor had seen me, as had the plastics specialist. An hour after entering the hospital I was told a bed was available. Its only because I pleaded to pop home to get some stuff that I wasn’t in that bed within another 30 minutes. In all, between entering the GP’s surgery and being admitted to the ward, hooked up to machines, drip in my arm, listening to the complaints of the bloke beside me, had taken 3 1/2 hours.

Thirty six hours later the surgeon removed a cyst from my achilles tendon and I would have been able to go home within 48 hours, if I hadn’t had a reaction to one of the antibiotics. However I stayed for 4 days with no rush to get me out of the bed. Within 24 hours of leaving The Alfred I had a home visit from a district nurse, in the following six weeks I had 4 clinic appointments and 6 physio appointments, all of which happened within 15 minutes of their appointed times.

My treatment at The Alfred was unfailingly fantastic and friendly, all covered by Medicare and I’d like to thank everyone there who cared for me. My Australian friends tell me that health care is expensive and slow yet my experience was phenomenal, without costing a cent, save the prescriptions.

For me there has been no downside, apart from not actually being able to pay back the hospital for the care I received through the expensive health insurance which would cover the cost. The hospital has no mechanism for my insurance provider to pay them, despite being covered for in-patient treatment. I’ve tried, even speaking to the hospital’s finance team from the ward, but they just don’t have a method for accepting insurance payments once you’re in the system in a public hospital and covered by Medicare.

I’m sure i could have had a very different experience and maybe if I’d been in a real emergency, requiring an ambulance and real trauma my experience would have been different. But why, I have been left asking, do the Australian government insist on health insurance for foreigners on working visas when reciprocal Medicare will cover the cost?

One last thing, when walking out of shallow water on the beach shuffle your feet, it disturbs the Stingrays!

 

Buildings and moves

Over a year into the Aussie way of life and we’ve moved home.  The suburb of South Yarra, in which this pommie formerly resided is thought to be the Fulham or Chelsea of Melbourne, one of the more fashionable ends of town, (though in fact if anything it resembles a Putney with better restaurants) which means there is a huge amount of investment property for sale. One of these properties turned out to be our apartment, so the time came to move on.

South Yarra is experiencing a building boom consisting entirely of apartment blocks. By my back of an envelope calculation there will be over 1,000 new apartments within a 500m radius of our former home within the next two years. In the 13 months we lived there we saw 3 buildings completed and another two started, just from the balcony window.

However the architecture is of the dull, unimaginative glass and concrete tower variety. Great to live in but dreary to look at and when constructed as close together as these are no views, plus the creation of huge wind tunnels. Melbourne doesn’t need any more wind! Actually the apartments aren’t always great to live in, a lot of space is given over to gyms, swimming pools and parking but some of the actual apartments are tiny with barely room to swing a wombat and with pretty poor finishes. At the same time some lovely buildings from a previous era have been destroyed to create these priapic glasshouses.

For example on the corner of Toorak Road and Chapel Street, the Capitol Grand is being built. They do like a grandiose name in these parts but they don’t always love their heritage. Alongside the many old warehouse buildings recently demolished was a beautiful 1930’s milk bar, with subtle and unique plasterwork above the door. Nothing particularly special in terms of Australian architecture, but the last remaining example in the suburb of a particular type of building representing a lost era that helped to give the area its character.

Its a paradox that in creating new buildings in a  desirable area, the older buildings that made it an interesting, liveable, desirable area are sacrificed, thus making it less desirable, interesting and liveable. This of course is not an argument that developers or indeed local councillors here or any where else understand. Widespread corruption in local government is an argument for another day, but it is still common practice around these parts…allegedly.

On the other hand the remaining legacy of historic architectural styles across the city is truly stunning. One of the things that makes Melbourne such a liveable city is its fascinating, mixture of colonial, Victorian, Art Deco, Italianate, Georgian, neo-Gothic, Tudorbethan, suburban, modernist and uber-modern styles. Indeed you can often see all of them in the same street.

Melbourne’s victorian gold rush years saw a massive building boom. The rich put up Italiante mansions complete with cupola’s, columns and towers the middle classes large villas with filigree balconies (Melbourne apparently has more architectural ironwork than any other city in the world) and the poor had tiny one story houses built by speculative developers. These are now of course incredibly desirable with their wooden veranda’s, tin roofs and opportunities to renovate.

 

The white block on the left, my former residence.

Victorian townhouse, South Yarra

Modernist townhouse South Yarra

Edwardian townhouse, Carlton

New modern house South Yarra

Victorian terrace, South melbourne

Victorian brick terrace, Hawksburn

Edwardian terraces, South Melbourne

Timber cottage, Prahrah

Modern terrace, Hawksburn

1930’s townhouse, South Yarra

Italianate terraces, South Melbourne

Brutalist Corbusier style social housing, Carlton

I don’t know if this is true of all Australian cities and towns, but suspect it might be; everyone will build whatever they fancy on their chunk of land. It is certainly an inalienable right to buy what is known as a block. Hence most residential streets lack any uniformity, with houses of wildly differing styles crammed together cheek by jowl.

As far as I can tell there is nothing similar to the streets of red brick terraces seen in most English towns. Occasionally you’ll come across a street of uniform terraces, there’s a couple in Carlton that spring to mind, but they’re few and far between. The higgledy-piggledy mishmash of styles can be seen in the street we’ve just moved to, at one end a wooden shack, next to a victorian villa, followed by a brand new concrete house then a 1930’s bungalow, more victorians, a small square apartment block, more bungalows of various ages, a couple of developer built modern houses and an empty plot. This is pretty typical.

As an aside, it’s odd to English eyes how rather than get a pair of net curtains most Melburnians would rather build a large fence or wall at the front of their house with the dual effect of stopping any light reaching the front windows while ensuring the tiny garden is permanently dank.

My quest to find an apartment similar to the one we had in South Yarra failed miserably. Given the number of apartments available it was surprisingly hard to find one to suit the ex-pats from Henley. It seems we struck lucky first time out with one of the biggest modern 2-beds that anyone has seen and it proved impossible to find anything in the least bit similar.

Not that the unit in South Yarra was huge, in fact it was pretty small but it seems there is nowhere like it. So our new home is a little town house with a mini back yard built about 10 years ago in the suburb of Prahran. To avoid confusion try saying pram, but substitute the “m” for an “n”.

The range of architectural styles does give the city an immense amount of character, thats without the fascinating streetscape of the CBD which shows just as much variety. I’ll talk about some of the modern architectural disasters in that another day, but in terms of residential architecture the large legacy blot are the 1970’s Corbusier style social housing blocks looming over most of the inner suburbs. There’s one in Prahran, one in South Melbourne, one in Carlton, lots in Fitzroy and so on. They truly are ugly casting a  brooding shadow over their neighbouring streets. And like 70’s social housing everywhere they are damp and deteriorating at a rapid rate. Interestingly no matter where they’re located they’re all exactly the same; one developer must have made a fortune.

Despite my various criticisms Melbourne is still a great place to live with its large variety of buildings, the chance every so often to come across a gem, just one of the many aspects that make every day interesting.

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I have just been sent an estate agents email advertising our old apartment at $130 a week more than we paid. No wonder they wanted us out!!!!!

 

 

Footy & Rio

It’s been a while but the Rio Olympics has inspired me to revive the Blog!

Watching the Olympic Games from a foreign city, especially one in a sport obsessed country has been an interesting experience. Firstly because it makes barely any impact in Melbourne. This could be something to do with the amateurish Channel 7 TV coverage which makes one pine for the relative impartiality, breadth and knowledge of the BBC or it could be to do with their obsession with the game universally known as “Footy” (noun pron. ph’de). Or it could just be that the old country is doing so well.

Just as no one in England would call the Premier League the EPL (they do that here), no one in Australia calls footy Australian Rules, though it is acceptable to call it AFL. They do love an acronym here, this one standing for Australian Football League. Not to be confused with NRL (National Rugby League), ARU (Australian Rugby Union) etc, (all of which are also known from time to time as footy. Ironically it’s only actual real football that isn’t!).

Melbourne is the home of footy, its where the game was first played, the rules – or lack of them – laid down and where the majority of teams play. If you’re ever at the very good sports museum at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) you can discover much more about the sports’ history, for example that it was originally played in the late 1850’s by cricketers as a way of staying fit during the winter and adapted, so they say, from games played in British public schools. Though in reality it more closely resemble gaelic football and for a while there was an annual match between players from the two codes.

Footy consists of 18 tall, athletic men per side with bad haircuts, tattoos and no sleeves on their guernseys – which shirts are still quaintly called –  running around an oval cricket pitch trying to catch an undersize rugby ball before kicking it between tall posts with the crossbar missing, with an extra set (the behind posts) either side just in case they miss. There are numerous umpires and apparently the coach can send on a mate during play to give instructions.

Footy at the MCG, The Hawks, Hawthorn v The Kangaroos, North Melbourne

It is fast and often furious, though apparently now much cleaner than the violent heyday of the 1970/80’s where mass brawls would break out at kick-off (or centre-bounce as its known in a literal definition of what the ref, sorry umpire does at every start or re-start). It is a very simple game played in 4 quarters of 20 minutes. Six points for a kick between the posts, 1 for a kick through the behind posts. Scores get into the hundreds. Disappointingly the linesman, or touch judge who theatrically indicates a score from behind the posts is no longer dressed like a butcher.

Melbourne boasts 9 of the 18 AFL teams but in recent years there has been an attempt to proselytise into other parts of Australia, so you’ll now find teams from Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Freemantle and Brisbane competing. Yet the heartland is Victoria, the epicentre Melbourne where you will find the Hawks, the Tigers, the Bombers, the Kangaroos, the Blues, the Demons, the Saints and the Magpies. Because if there is one thing they like to do in Aussie sports its give a team a nickname and then only ever refer to them by that name. This is confusing for the novice and not just in footy.

At the Olympics I have been watching the Opals, the Socceroos (see what they did there?), the Pearls, the Diamonds, the Dolphins, the Stingers, the Boomers, the Hockeyroos (oh look they’ve done it again) and the Kookaburras. For a sport obsessed nation the performance of all of these teams, bar the Boomers (men’s basketball) has been universally disappointing; teams defeated time and again in the quarter finals or not even breaking out of their groups. Aussie team sport has confounded national expectations by being a bit crap, just like GB used to be!

And its not just the team sports that have failed in Rio, swimmers have under performed, yes they won 3 golds but that was half the target, in fact there is a huge amount of national soul searching going on about the swimmers, not to mention the cyclists, footballers (proper football that is), beach volley ballers, men’s Rugby 7’s, track and field athletes and rowers. Yes, Kim Brennan won Gold in the single scull, but the men’s 4X, hot favourites choked – they like that phrase – the men’s eight didn’t qualify for the regatta, the women’s 8 only got in when Russia were chucked out and they didn’t bother to send a lightweight four. Oh yes the blood letting has started big time in rowing.

For a Pommie the sight of Aussies being interviewed as the “plucky loser” by a patronising over excited idiot, having come seventh in their heat of the 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500 or having to race the C final, carries a huge element of schadenfreude. It’s not that I rejoice in their doing badly, I can appreciate that the athletes have put in a huge amount of work and made massive sacrifices – I know this because they tell us in every interview ad nauseam – its just that after all the shit we Poms have taken from Aussies, especially from their godawful press, when we’ve been beaten by the Wallabies or a team in the “baggy green”; it is immensely satisfying to see them suffer the heart rending disappointment that we used to endure. Did I mention we also hold the Ashes and beat the Wallabies 3-0 recently?

I’m told that by the end of the Games the press will be readjusting the medal table so that it’s sorted by medals per capita. Even then it doesn’t make great reading, but if you’d like to play this game see medalspercapita.com.

Back at the footy, just as we Brits do with football (soccer here, how I hate that word) when international sport goes bad, minds are turning to the excitement of the  domestic game and the final few regular season games. I say excitement, but in reality its such a one dimensional, predictable game that I really struggle to see why they are so devoted to it. If you get to a game don’t be surprised too at the lack of atmosphere. Where is the singing? Where is the chanting?  Not even a lot of banter, in a nation famous for its banter! I guess you need to be brought up with the game to develop that innate love for it. There will be play-off games (elimination finals, semi-finals and preliminary finals) between the teams at the top of the table (oops, top of the ladder, not table), then the Grand Final. Every final of every sport in Australia is a Grand Final. Not a final, always a Grand Final. Even at your local junior ultimate frisbee team playing out of a shed in the park it’s Grand.

The best news about the Grand Final no matter which teams contest it, even if they’re from Adelaide and Sydney, is that Victoria now has a public holiday to celebrate the fact. Not on the day itself of course but the day before. (This would be like having a bank holiday the day prior to the FA cup final. There’s also a holiday for a horse race, the Melbourne Cup!!) Of course this is where Aussies really compete, where the only table to worry about will be the one with salads on, because pubic holidays mean just one thing, the Grand Final of the men’s duathlon comprising the day long barbie and stubby drinking contest. In this if nothing else Aussies are always winners.

The MCG an awesome arena

The MCG is the best sports arena I’ve ever been to. Certainly better than anything in the UK, definitely putting Twickenham to shame especially when it comes to catering, yes there are lots of chips and pies but there is also Sushi and Fat Yak ale! Roll on next year’s Ashes tests.

Why are Brits called Poms or Pommies?

I’ve been wondering this recently, so have turned to Wikipedia for help.

Stolen from Wiki….
Pommy or Pom
The terms pommy, pommie and pom, in Australia and New Zealand usually denotes an English person (or, less commonly, people from other parts of the UK).[7] The Oxford Dictionary defines their use as “often derogatory” [8] but after complaints to the Australian Advertising Standards Board about five advertisements poking fun at “Poms”,[9] the Board ruled (in 2006) that these words are not offensive.[10] The New Zealand Broadcasting Standards Authority made a similar ruling in 2010.
There are several folk etymologies for Pommy or Pom. The best-documented of these is that pommy originated as a contraction of “pomegranate“.[11][12] According to this explanation, “pomegranate” was Australian rhyming slang for “immigrant” (“Jimmy Grant”).[13] Usage of “pomegranate” for English people may have been strengthened by a belief in Australia that sunburn occurred more frequently among English immigrants, turning those with fair skin the colour of pomegranates.[14] Another explanation – now generally considered to be a false etymology – was that “pom” or “pommy” were derived from an acronym such as POM (“Prisoner of Millbank”), POME (“Prisoner of Mother England”) or POHMS (“Prisoner Of Her Majesty’s Service”).[15] However, there is no evidence that such terms, or their acronyms, were used in Australia when “pom” and “pommy” entered use there.
During the wars with Napoleon the French troops referred to the Irish troops as pommes[citation needed], short for pommes de terre or potatoes. Transport of convicts from Britain to Australia commenced soon after, and these included many Irishmen. It is possible that the term pommes was applied to the Irish convicts, and later to all convicts. Note the similarity of pronunciation and spelling of pommie to the french pomme.

So there you go, you never expected to actually learn something did you?